n, however, our merchants have become
perforce familiar, a large share of their imported commodities
being invoiced in accordance with it. Its immense superiority to our
complicated and arbitrary weights and measures, in the tables whereof
the same word often has half a dozen meanings, is beyond argument.
In the United States it has earned a quasi-official adoption, but the
force of habit among the people has yet to be overcome.

We may here give, in evidence of the increasing hold these expositions
have upon the popular mind, the gradual multiplication of the numbers
exhibiting. At London, in '51, the exhibitors were 13,937; at Paris,
'55, 23,954; at London, '62, 28,653; and at Paris, '67, 50,226.

Austria, with admirable spirit, determined to anticipate her turn to
enter the lists of peace. Undismayed by Solferino and Sadowa, she had
found her Antaeus in Andrassy. Her capital city was advancing with
immense strides in beauty and extent. Geographically and ethnically it
was, like the empire itself, a meeting-ground of north and south, east
and west. Isolated from the sea, it offered for the transport of heavy
articles a system of railways proved by the event to be sufficiently
effective. It was decided that the march of progress should be more
than kept up, and that the building, with its appendages, should be an
improvement on all its predecessors in extent, in architectural effect
and in solidity of material. The dimensions are so variously stated,
owing largely to difference of opinion as to what should be embraced
within the admeasurement, that we are at a loss how to give them. To
the main building, however, was assigned a capacity of seventy-three
thousand five hundred and ninety-three square metres. Sixty-three
hundred and eighty of these were awarded to France, ten metres less
to England; and thirteen hundred and sixty to the United States. The
marquee-like rotunda rose to a height of two hundred and fifty feet,
with a diameter at base of three hundred and fifty-four. The principal
entrance, with piers and arches of cut stone profusely decorated
with statues and reliefs, was in highly satisfactory contrast to
the fragile shells of glass and cast iron that sheltered the earlier
exhibitions.

[Illustration: ROTUNDA OF THE VIENNA EXPOSITION BUILDING, 1873.]

Perhaps in all this solid work the demands of time had not been duly
considered. Certainly, the display was not punctual to the appointed
period of open